Methods of making high purity, constant diameter optical glass fibers for telecommunications and other electronic applications are taught in U.S. Pat. No. 3,865,564 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,028,080. The purity of the fiber material is extremely important. Beam And Fiber Optics, p. 22, Academic Press, (1976), J. A. Arnaud teaches that contamination of the fiber by one part per million of hydroxyl radical (OH.sup.-) impurity may result in absorption losses on the order of about 1 dB/kM. When fiber optics are employed in a system which requires the long distance transmission of information, it is extremely important to minimize the signal loss and thereby reduce the number of amplifiers needed to transmit a signal. Reducing the number of amplifiers in a system minimizes the cost of an optical fiber system.
Thus, it would be desirable to have a method which can dissociate the hydroxyl radicals present in quartz or in fused silica during fiber manufacturing operations to decrease the signal losses of the optical fiber and minimize the cost of fiber optic sytems.